This is a World Premiere Sneak Preview of the upcoming documentary, I Remember Miles, by internationally known Producer/Director Malcolm W. Adams for Totown Digital Media, a company of Totown Communications Group Japan.

Transcript from the Miles Davis Conference, May 10-11, 1996, Washington University in St. Louis. Here Macero speaks about his work with Miles Davis.

... And talk about the, how the records were made. I met Miles several years before, I think at Birdland, when in 1954 and 1955, they had projects to do with Leonard Bernstein and I'd get a lot of samples for the album. I had written something for the very end, and Lenny didn't like it, he said it was too lugubrious, so we had to get somebody like Miles to swing this particular tune. But they did ask me to write a couple of introductions, so they got Miles, they got his group with Coltrane, and they came to the session and we became friends. I wrote a couple of introductions and picked one, and that was it. And then about a year and a half later I became his producer.Because I joined CBS, my first record date was in 1955. It was a marvelous experience with Miles. I'd like to just play something that you're never gonna hear, ever again. I mean these tracks, I put together for CBS Sony recently are not coming out the way we had proposed them [plays music samples].

Later on, with Miles' music, I must say, you could do anything with it. He said to me, "Do whatever you want." I say, "Oh yeah, okay, I'll take care of it." So you could use the front in the back, the back in the front, the middle somewhere else, or you didn't have to use any of that. Many times when I was working on a Miles album, and editing it, I would take everything from the very beginning of the session, any little fragment, I would mix it down and put it all together. And then finally (I'd) cut the material and put it all together using the three-machine splice technique with a lot of reverb machines and all kinds of techniques that we had at that time. One guy said he was going to take a record back because he heard the music going back and forth, left and right. Well, we had a machine that did that with Miles. I mean, if you listen to some of the tracks, you hear the shifting. You say 'what the hell is going on?'

You know, even on Bitches Brew and all that stuff, that was all mechanically done in the editing room. All subject to Miles' approval. He came to the session, I mean the editing room, about six times in his lifetime while I was with him at CBS. And the one time that he did come when we were doing In a Silent Way, and everybody says that's a classic record. Sure it is a classic record. I said, "Look at it, I've mixed everything now on this particular record, I think you'd better get your ass down here because," I said, "I'm really bewildered, because I've got 30, 35 reels of quarter-in masters, and I said, I gotta cut it down to two, an A side and a B side." And I said, "If you don't come, I'm gonna make the cuts anyway." He said, "Aw, shit, I'll be right down." So he came down, and he stayed with me most of the day, and what happened was that he, we, cut out everything down to two reels of tape with eight and a half minutes on each side, and then he started to leave. I said, "Where the hell you going?" He said, "That's my record." I said, "Wait a minute, you can't do this. They're going to skin you alive, they'll do me in." They wanted to do me in anyway, because we were kind of rebels at the time.

And I said... "give me a couple days and I'll see what I can figure out," because we've got these two reels with one eight and a half, nine minutes on one side, and something on the other side. So what I did, I copied little excerpts of the very, if you listen to it very carefully, you'll hear a lot of repeats, but you don't know that they're repeats, because it sounds like a continuous song, and a continuous performance. I bridged... I made 18 minutes... I mean the eight and a half minutes or nine minutes come up to eighteen and a half, nineteen or twenty minutes on that side. I said, "I'm home free." And I did the same thing on Side B. And then, the record became a classic. But the critics wouldn't know that. I mean, that's why... I love critics, but I don't like them to review my records.

Trumpets have an allure that is hard to describe, even when they are silent. When they are as gorgeous as the 1957 Martin Committee Model , Lot 128, that once belonged to Miles Davis, they are even more irresistible. With a blue-green finish, keys inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a separate mouthpiece, accompanied by a document concerning its provenance, the only thing missing is the genius that once played it. The lot has an estimate of $15,000 to $25,000. It failed to sell.

The document states that in 1966 the trumpet was given by Miles Davis, a huge boxing fan, to Ray Robinson II, son of the boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson. Davis, a special fan of the boxing superstar, was instrumental in encouraging his retirement after his final fight with Joey Archer in 1965: "Sugar, it's time man" was all he had to say. Robinson retired the next day. This trumpet could only have complemented a man who was not only a jazz legend in his own lifetime, but also extremely handsome. Christie's catalog offers some history:

"The Martin Committee Model was originally designed in the late 1930s for the Martin Band Instrument Company by a "committee" which included brass instrument makers Renold Schilke, Vincent Bach, Elden Benge, and Foster Reynolds. Miles Davis played custom made Committees throughout his career." It is easy to see why.

On August 29, 1970, Miles gave a brief but stunning performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in Great Britain. A year earlier he had still been playing in jazz clubs for audiences of 30-40, but now he was on the same bill as the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joni Mitchell, and The Doors, playing to a crowd of 600,000.

Excerpts from this concert have been previously released on Isle of Wight compilation albums, and were titled, 'Call it Anythin'' and 'Call it Anything.' With the release in November 2004 of the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, Miles's entire 38-minute performance at the Isle of Wight is finally available to the public.

Acadamy Award winning director Murray Lerner beautifully presents all the power and dynamism of the music, as played by Miles and an all-star band consisting of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Gary Bartz, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Airto Moreira. The footage is in glorious full-color detail, featuring a healthy-looking Miles without sunglasses (as can be seen from the screen grabs below), and the sound quality is excellent.

The issued version is structured in two parts: the first part is used as Intro, Interlude and Coda. The second part, or Solos Section, is based on a vamp and is used to develop the solos. The beginning of the ostinato of the second section was created by looping a phrase that starts at 2:50.

Published in May 2001, Miles Beyond is the first book that deals in-depth and sympathetically with the Miles Davis's electric period, 1967-1991. Primarily based on new and often exclusive interviews with over 50 musicians, managers, producers, family, and romantic partners, the pioneering book unearths much new information and thousands of never-before-revealed facts, insights, and revelations about Miles, including many new insights into his working methods, artistic development, and his private life, all set in the context of a chronological analysis of the music he produced from 1967 to 1991.

The 352-page book contains 17 Chapters with 266 densely-written pages of text, Endnotes, a Bibliography, an overview of the personnel of Miles's live bands 1963-1991, and, from Enrico Merlin, a Discography and a 40-page Sessionography, with details of all Miles's electric music that was officially released in 2001.

From Bloomsbury Magazine: "The most important book on Miles Davis ever."

From buy.com: "Although many books have been written about Miles Davis's far-reaching influence on the jazz world, his electronic experiments from the late 1960s to his death in the early '90s have been less well documented. Dutch music writer Paul Tingen, who first discovered Davis via one of the trumpeter's more rock-oriented albums, redresses this imbalance with his remarkably comprehensive Miles Beyond, an illuminating survey of the great musician's later experimental forays. Tingen analyzes Davis's recording process through revealing interviews with many of his musical colleagues, who recount the seemingly haphazard methods the trumpeter used to draw out the best performances from his musicians. The author also traces the influence of such seminal Davis albums as On The Corner on later generations of hip-hop and dance music artists--for example, Bill Laswell, whose Panthalassa album controversially remixed much of the trumpeter's late-'60s and early-'70s output for 1990s ears. Written with a fan's enthusiasm and a scholar's erudition, Miles Beyond is a refreshing re-examination of the later output of one of the great jazz innovators."

Introduction

Where were you the first time you heard the music of Miles Davis? Since you are reading these words, chances are that you will know the answers to this question.

The memories of the big moments in our lives, whether personal or historical, remain with us forever, and are often embedded in seemingly irrelevant details: how things smelled at the time, what music we were listening to, what the weather was like. This is often called the "JFK effect," illustrated by the proverbial question: "where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot?"

Miles Davis never achieved the household fame of the likes of JFK. And yet an amazing number of people remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard his music, illustrating Miles Davis's huge impact.

My own answer to the question when I first heard the music of Miles Davis will bring the reasons for the existence of this site and for writing Miles Beyond into focus. I first became aware of Miles 's music as a teenager in the late '70s, on Dutch radio, at my parents' home. It was a sunny afternoon in the middle of summer and I heard some seriously weird stop-start rock music fronted by a screaming electric guitar.

Since I was—among many other things* —into experimental and avant-garde rock music at the time, bands like King Crimson and Henry Cow, and loved screaming electric guitars, I listened attentively, and made a mental note of the artist mentioned after the piece finished. I remember wondering: "Miles Davis? Isn't he a jazz artist? But this music doesn't sound much like jazz. Maybe this is another Miles Davis." I went to the local music library about a week later and found out that they only had records by one Miles Davis. They were indeed filed under jazz, and hence unlikely to contain the piece I'd heard on the radio.

I was puzzled and about to give up when I noticed a cover that looked promising: a red and gold psychedelic affair with a night vision of a large city seen through what looked like an aquarium. I took it home, placed it on my record player and found my jaw dropping. This definitely wasn't jazz, more like some weird, avant-garde, totally over the top funk. I was initially put off by the nerve-wrecking density and seeming monotony of the music. This was nothing like the engaging, open, stop-start stuff I'd heard on the radio. But since Agharta, the record I'd brought home, was all I had, and since the cover looked so cool, I persevered. The insurgent cover instruction to play the album back at the loudest possible volume was further encouragement, much to my parents' dismay.

Soon I discovered that astonishing moment, 14 minutes and 43 seconds into Side 1, where the band cuts out and Pete Cosey's guitar solo goes into total overdrive. Being a guitarist myself, I thought I was an insider on the outer fringes of crazy electric guitar playing, but this was beyond my comprehension. From that moment on Side 1 until the middle of Side 4, the music was continuously interesting, provocative, unbelievable, and highly exciting. I was sold. For the next months Agharta rarely left my record player.

It bewildered me that I didn't have a clue as to how the music and the solos were structured or conceived. There was clearly a large element of improvisation going on, but the music was too structured and too melodic and there was too much flawless interplay between the musicians for it to be totally improvised. I was baffled by this dense and bizarre music, because I had no frame of reference. Nothing I knew sounded even remotely like it, not even the other electric Miles Davis albums I sought out and enjoyed, among them Get Up With It, In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew. (Fifteen years later I finally found the piece I had first heard in the Dutch radio. It turned out to be "Gemini/Double Image" from Live-Evil. It was testimony to the strong impression that piece made on me that I could still recognise it after all that time.)

***The idea of writing a book on Miles's electric period was born one afternoon in the early '90s at Goldsmiths' College in London, where I was studying for a music degree. I ran into two guys around 50 years of age in the canteen who identified themselves as jazz musicians and college tutors. We talked and they asked me whether I liked jazz. I told them that I greatly admired jazz, but generally speaking didn't have much resonance with it, but that I really liked what Miles Davis had done when he fused jazz with rock. Their reaction pushed me back in my seat. If looks could kill I would have died that very instant. They proceeded to unleash a degree of vitriol on Miles Davis, for 'selling out,' for playing 'kid's music,' for 'betraying the jazz community,' etc etc, which astonished me. This was not a simple disagreement about musical taste, this was pure hatred.

What amazed me most was that they were not traditional jazz musicians, but known and respected (in London) free jazz players. It amazed me because between 1980 and 1983 I frequently visited the BIM-Huis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands's premier free-jazz club. Hungry for more unusual sounds, I had witnessed many free-jazz concerts there, and even joined in with some of the tutorial jam session for young musicians. For me avant-garde was synonymous with open-mindedness, with an urge to boldly go where no-one had gone before, musically speaking. For me it was, and is, about a willingness not to dismiss any music genre or sound or structure a priori, but instead to stretch as far as possible in understanding and accommodating new sounds and styles of music. And here these two old avant-garde jazzers were as conservative, closed-minded, and dismissive as classical music tutors who reckoned that all music written after 1900 sucked. Perplexing.

It was my first direct encounter with the intense feelings that Miles Davis's venture into rock-influenced music evoked in certain sections of the jazz community. It enticed and intrigued me, and I ended up writing a dissertation on Miles's electric period for my graduation. In doing so I found out that there were no books available that covered the electric period well. After my graduation, in 1995, I approached a number of publishers with the idea, without success.

Finally, in 1998, I mentioned the idea to Bob Doerschuk, then editor of Musician, who advised me to get into contact with Bob Nirkind at Billboard Books. It turned out to be a moment of sychronicity. A fan of Miles's electric music, Nirkind told me he'd just had the same idea a few hours before my e-mail arrived.

What followed after I signed the book contract was lots of hard labor, as well as synchronicity, serendipity, and inspiration. During the next two years I travelled to New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, London, and Italy, interviewed about 50 associates, musicians, and partners of Miles Davis, and came to terms with almost 60 official electric Miles Davis CDs, as well as with dozens of bootlegs.

From Chapter 2 - ChangesStill to come: The orginal extended biography of Miles Davis's pre-1967 career that was written for Miles Beyond, but ended up being published in a severely abridged form, because of lack of space.

From Chapter 4 - "New Directions"

Miles's visionary qualities are illustrated by an anecdote told by Herbie Hancock:

John McLaughlin himself does not appear to have recognized the brilliance of his own playing, or that of the other musicians, on the In A Silent Way session. His bewilderment was illustrated by an anecdote told by Herbie Hancock. "After we finished we walked out of the studio," Hancock remembered, "and while we were standing in the hallway John came over and whispered to me, 'Can I ask you a question? I answered, 'Sure'. He then said, 'Herbie, I can't tell... was that any good what we did? I mean, what did we do? I can't tell what's going on!' So I told him, 'John, welcome to a Miles Davis session. Your guess is as good as mine. I have no idea, but somehow when the records come out, they end up sounding good.' Miles had a way of seeing straight through what happened and knowing that over time people would figure out what was really happening."

From Chapter 5 - "Sorcerer's Brew"

On the many ingredients that went into the making of Bitches Brew:

Teo Macero added mid-20th century studio trickery, a 19th century classical music awareness of musical structure, and a way of looking at music as abstract blocks of sound, which he freely cut and moved around. In other words, the two most heavily edited tracks on Bitches Brew were hybrids of "figurative" and "abstract" art. They combined, respectively, the traditional musical line of something akin to a sonata form with the cut and paste ideas that had come out of musique concrète, serial music, and studio technology. Add to this the strongly chromatic improvising of the keyboard players, which has echoes of classical atonal music, and it is clear that an impressive amount of influences went into the making of Bitches Brew. This is no doubt one of the major reasons for the recording's immense success and influence. Virtually anyone willing to listen to it with an open mind is able to recognize something familiar in the music, despite the fact that it contains few easily identifiable melodies, hooks, or vamps.

From Chapter 6 - "Kind of Blues"

On why Miles went into electric music:

In response to the question why Miles went into electric music, I'd like to offer two interpretations of Miles's approach to music that have only occasionally been touched upon. The first interpretation is founded on the scientific axiom that accepts the simplest explanation of the known facts as the most plausible hypothesis. The hypothesis proposed here is that Miles is best understood as primarily a blues player who moved into jazz and then into jazz-rock, rather than a jazz player who was influenced by the blues. This makes sense of many aspects of his career and trumpet style that have so far seemed inexplicable. The second interpretation follows from the observation that Miles built every new musical step on his previous steps, and asserts that the secret of his enormous success and influence is that he was a traditionalist and revolutionary at the same time.

From Chapter 9 - "On-Off"

Percussionist James Mtume about the direction of Miles's mid-1970s music:

"Miles and I constantly talked about music and the direction it was going," Mtume recalled, "and one of the things we talked about was fusion. My view was that the fusion movement was the emphasis of form over feeling. It became about how complex you can write things. This is not writing from the heart, but writing from the head. Playing bars of 11/8 for complexity's sake is great for school, but not for music. Miles went way past that. We went straight for the feeling. We were exploring how long we could keep one chord interesting. That was infuriating to the critics, who were glorifying fusion. But we said, 'Fuck fusion.' We were into emotion."

"The other thing that we talked about," Mtume continued, "was that Miles felt that his music had moved away from the pulse of African-American music. He felt his shit had become too esoteric and that he had contributed to that. Miles wanted to find a way back into connecting with the black community. But the aesthetic question was, 'How do we do that?' We discussed this more than anything else. At the time Miles was listening to a lot of James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and George Clinton, and that's what he wanted to put together. Miles's idea was to get back to the root of the music, to the funk, but to funk with a high degree of experimental edge. He wanted to take it much further."

From Chapter 12 - "Star On Miles"

On "Jean-Pierre":

"Jean-Pierre" was to become Miles's signature tune and concert closer until the end of 1987. It was also the concluding theme of his retrospective Paris concert in July 1991. Miles became strongly associated with this melody during the '80s, and this has symbolic value. Because of his grounding in the blues, Miles always had a proclivity for alternating major and minor thirds, one of the hallmarks of the blues, and the melody of "Jean-Pierre" contains both major and minor thirds. Some have criticized the "simplistic," childlike nature of the song, and many musicians would be reluctant to perform it for this very reason. But Miles showed courage in making the tune such an important feature of his live sets. The childlike nature of the tune is illustrative of the childlike sense of wonder and open-mindedness with which he approached his art. They led him never to dismiss any music out of hand, and to be constantly in search for the new and for the magic.

From Chapter 15 - "Alive Around The World"

Bassist Benny Rietveld on his time in Miles's band, April 1988-October 1989:

"There was never anything negative coming from Miles. He'd let me know if it wasn't happening, but always in a positive way, like 'Let's try this feel on this song.' You had to really pay attention, and be right in the moment all the time. He had an incredible presence, which was like a mystical part of him, drawing everyone in. His presence kept everybody on their toes, so that the music was still alive. When musicians play something they know already, the initial spark goes. He never liked that. So he would change things every night, not really radical changes, but things that kept the music fresh, as if you were playing it for the first time. It was like having a Zen mindset: everything is always now, there is no before or after, you should be totally immersed in what's happening in the moment. He didn't talk much. There is not a lot that needs to be said anyway, and he knows that people usually don't listen. So why talk? But he sometimes made these short cryptic comments, and they were like a nut you had to crack open, and find the meaning on your own."

You can look inside the book hereYou can buy the book here starting from 4.50 dollars (new) or here starting from 5 pounds (new) or here starting from 3.70 euro (used)

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Miles Ahead...

Electric Miles (1968 to 1975)

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) is widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. He was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s

Davis's influences included late 1960s acid rock and funk artists such as Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, many of whom he met through Betty Mabry, a young model and songwriter Miles married in 1968 and divorced a year later. The musical transition required that Davis and his band adapt to electric instruments in both live performances and the studio.

By the time In a Silent Way had been recorded in February 1969, Davis had augmented his standard quintet with additional players. Hancock and Joe Zawinul were brought in to assist Corea on electric keyboards, and guitarist John McLaughlin made the first of his many appearances. By this point, Shorter was also doubling on soprano saxophone. After recording this album, Williams left to form his group Lifetime and was replaced by Jack DeJohnette.

Six months later, an even larger group of musicians, including Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira and Bennie Maupin recorded the double LP Bitches Brew, which became a huge seller, hitting gold record status (half a million copies) by 1976. This album and In a Silent Way were among the first fusions of jazz and rock that were commercially successful, building on the groundwork laid by Charles Lloyd, Larry Coryell, and many others who pioneered a genre that would become known simply as "Jazz-rock fusion".

During this period, Davis toured with the "lost quintet" of Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette. The group's repertoire included material from Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, the 1960s quintet albums, and an occasional standard.In 1972, Davis was introduced to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen by young arranger and cellist, and later Grammy award winner, Paul Buckmaster, leading to a period of new creative exploration for Davis. Biographer J.K.Chambers wrote that "The effect of Davis's study of Stockhausen could not be repressed for long. ... Davis's own 'space music,' shows Stockhausen's influence compositionally." His recordings and performances during this period were described as "space music" by fans, by music critic Leonard Feather, and by Buckmaster who stated: "a lot of mood changes - heavy, dark, intense - definitely space music."

Both Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way feature "extended" (more than 20 minutes each) compositions that were never actually "played straight through" by the musicians in the studio. Instead, Davis and producer Teo Macero selected musical motifs of various lengths from recorded extended improvisations and edited them together into a musical whole which only exists in the recorded version. Bitches Brew made use of such electronic effects as multi-tracking, tape loops and other editing techniques. Both records, especially Bitches Brew, proved to be huge sellers.

Starting with Bitches Brew, Davis' albums began to often feature cover art much more in line with psychedelic art or black power movements than that of his earlier albums. He took significant cuts in his usual performing fees in order to open for rock groups like the Steve Miller Band, the Grateful Dead and Santana. Several live albums were recorded during the early 1970s at such performances: Live at the Fillmore East, March 7, 1970: It's About That Time (March 1970), Black Beauty (April 1970) and Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East (June 1970).

By the time of Live-Evil in December 1970, Davis' ensemble had transformed into a much more funk-oriented group. Davis began experimenting with wah-wah effects on his horn. The ensemble with Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett and Michael Henderson, often referred to as the "Cellar Door band" (the live portions of Live-Evil were recorded at a club by that name), never recorded in the studio, but is documented in the six CD Box Set The Cellar Door Sessions, which was recorded over four nights in December 1970.

In 1970, Davis contributed extensively to the soundtrack of a documentary about the African-American boxer Jack Johnson. Himself a devotee of boxing, Davis drew parallels between Johnson, whose career had been defined by the fruitless search for a Great White Hope to dethrone him, and Davis' own career, in which he felt the establishment had prevented him from receiving the acclaim and rewards that were due him. The resulting album, 1971's Jack Johnson, contained two long pieces that utilized musicians (some of whom were not credited on the record) including guitarists John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock, Herbie Hancock on a broken Farfisa organ and drummer Billy Cobham.

As Davis stated in his autobiography, he wanted to make music for the young African-American audience. On The Corner (1972) blended funk elements with the traditional jazz styles he had played his entire career. The album was highlighted by the appearance of saxophonist Carlos Garnett. The record provoked fierce disparagement from many critics, with one British critic noting: "I love Miles, but this is where I get off." In his autobiography, Davis stated that this criticism was made because no critic could categorize this music and complained that the album was promoted by the "traditional" jazz radio stations.

After recording On the Corner, Davis put together a new band, with only Michael Henderson, Carlos Garnett and percussionist Mtume returning from the previous band. It included guitarist Reggie Lucas, tabla player Badal Roy, sitarist Khalil Balakrishna and drummer Al Foster. It was unusual in that none of the sidemen were major jazz instrumentalists; as a result, the music emphasized rhythmic density and shifting textures instead of individual solos. This group, which recorded in the Philharmonic Hall for the album In Concert (1972), was unsatisfactory to Davis. Through the first half of 1973, he dropped the tabla and sitar, took over keyboard duties, and added guitarist Pete Cosey.

The Davis/Cosey/Lucas/Henderson/Mtume/Foster ensemble would remain virtually intact over the next two years. Initially, Dave Liebman played saxophones and flute with the band. In 1974, he was replaced by Sonny Fortune.Big Fun (1974) was a double album containing four long jams, recorded between 1969 and 1972. Similarly, Get Up With It (1974) collected recordings from the previous five years. Get Up With It included "He Loved Him Madly", a tribute to Duke Ellington, as well as one of Davis' most lauded pieces from this era, "Calypso Frelimo". This was his last studio album of the 1970s.

In 1974 and 1975, Columbia recorded three double-LP live Davis albums: Dark Magus, Agharta and Pangaea. Dark Magus is a 1974 New York concert; the latter two are recordings of consecutive concerts from the same February 1975 day in Osaka, Japan. At the time, only Agharta was available in the US; Pangaea and Dark Magus were initially released only by CBS/Sony Japan. All three feature at least two electric guitarists (Reggie Lucas and Pete Cosey, deploying an array of post-Hendrix electronic distortion devices; Dominique Gaumont is a third guitarist on Dark Magus), electric bass, drums, reeds, and Davis on electric trumpet and organ. These albums were the last he was to record for five years.

Davis was troubled by osteoarthritis (which led to a hip replacement operation in 1976, the first of several), sickle-cell anemia, depression, bursitis, ulcers and a renewed dependence on alcohol and drugs (primarily cocaine), and his performances were routinely panned throughout late 1974 and early 1975. By the time the group reached Japan in February 1975, Davis was teetering on a physical breakdown and required copious amounts of vodka and narcotics to complete his engagements.After a Newport Jazz Festival performance at Avery Fisher Hall in New York on July 1, 1975, Davis withdrew almost completely from the public eye for six years. As Gil Evans said, "His organism is tired. And after all the music he's contributed for 35 years, he needs a rest."

The Albums:Miles In The Sky 1968Filles De Kilimanjaro 1968In A Silent Way 1969Jazz Greatest Hits 1969A Tribute to Jack Johnson 1970Black Beauty: Miles Davis At Fillmore West 1970Bitches Brew 1970At Fillmore: Live At The Fillmore East 1970What I Say, Vol. 1 1971Live-Evil 1971On The Corner 1972In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall 1973Dark Magus: Live At Carnegie Hall 1974Big Fun 1974Get Up With It 1974Agharta 1975Pangaea 1975Water Babies 1977Circle In The Round 1979Directions 1979